Obedience is rendered first to God, and from His love proceeds all other love. Obedience is rendered first to God, and from this obedience proceeds all other obedience. The Bible said about the obedience of parents: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Ephesians 6.1). It is thus an essential obedience, but “in the Lord.”
Jonathan did not obey his father Saul in his persecution of David but rather rebuked him, saying: “Why then do you sin against innocent blood, to put David to death without cause?” (1 Kingdoms 19.5). King Saul was a cause of stumbling to his son Jonathan, but Jonathan overcame this stumbling. In the same way King Solomon, even though he had a great respect for his mother Bathsheba, did not obey her in her intercession for Adonijah, his brother (3 Kingdoms 2.19-23).
The limit of obedience precludes stumbling. From your association with people and your experiences in life, you can realize the sources of stumbling for you. Benefit, then, from this experience by surrounding yourself with a pure atmosphere as much as you can. Those whom you cannot avoid physically, avoid with respect to your thoughts and direction of life.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity
Category: PARENTS
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All of these punishments on earth are different from the eternal punishment. The eternal punishment is eliminated by repentance, but the earthly punishment remains intact. So the mother who does not bring up her son properly repents and her sins are forgiven, but her son remains as a bitterness of heart to her on earth. The student who does not study and fails can repent and the Lord will forgive him for his negligence, but this does not bring back a year of his life lost on earth in vain. The person for whom since causes disease can be forgiven his sin by repentance, but the disease remains with him as an earthly punishment as a natural result of sin.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity -
The question for Christians who are already married and raising children is not: “How can I reduce to a bare minimum my family obligations so as to be ‘free’ to lead a ‘more spiritual’ life?” It is rather: “How should I nurture within my family life my love for God and my neighbor?”
Children in the Church Today: An Orthodox Perspective
by Sister Magdalen -
And yet that mother is right. She has sacrificed herself for her family. The others have allowed themselves plenty of freedom. She has had no share of it. She has worked, slaved, given up every moment of her day. But there’s something more serious, something which is the real cause of suffering. She hasn’t been understood. They have taken her for granted; they haven’t, for example, noticed her crying in silence.
Letters from the Desert
by Carlo Carretto -
The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau -
153. YOUR COMFORT AND THE COMFORT OF OTHERS
A noble person does not build his comfort on the weariness of others. But the noble one is he who sacrifices his comfort in order to comfort others.
A mother might feel comfort in having her son by her side while the son, at the same time, might find comfort in being far from home. He might travel, migrate, become a monk or live on his own with a wife. Here, the noble mother would let him go without insisting on her comfort by his side.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV
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“We spare neither labors nor means in order to teach our children secular sciences, so that they can serve well the earthly authorities. Only the knowledge of the holy Faith, the service of the Heavenly King are a matter of indifference to us. We allow them to attend spectacles but we care little whether they go to Church and stand within it reverently. We demand an account from them of what they learned in their secular institutes—why do we not demand an account from them of what they heard in the Lord’s house?”
—St. John Chrysostom -
“The love of God is not taught. No one has taught us to enjoy the light or to be attached to life more than anything else. And no one has taught us to love the two people who brought us into the world and educated us. Which is all the more reason to believe that we did not learn to love God as a result of outside instruction.”
—St. Basil the Great -
The litmus test of true love for God is our love for our neighbor.
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